Far from Holy Fathers

It is curious that despite Spain’s immense services to the Roman Church — expelling Islam from Western Europe over half a millennium of hard fighting, then opening up the Western hemisphere to Catholicism — only two Spaniards have become pope, and both were Borgias (Alfonso de Borja, who reigned as Pope Calixtus III, 1455-8, spelt his family name the Spanish way). The year after his election, Calixtus gave his nephew Rodrigo Borgia, then aged 24, a cardinal’s hat and in 1457 made him vice-chancellor of the Holy See. As such, he played an important role in the election of four popes, Pius II, Paul II, Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, before becoming pope himself in 1492 and reigning 11 years as Alexander VI. In some ways the Borgias set the pattern for the pontificates that followed, up to the time of Pius V (1566-72), whom Gerard Noel calls the last of the Renaissance popes. He designates Nicholas V (1447-55) the first of them, and his book surveys the 18 pontificates which span the entire Renaissance period. His aim, in writing lustily about these jolly, disgraceful and creative times is to rescue the Borgias from the hostile mythology which has encrusted itself around them and, in particular, to show that Alexander VI does not deserve his reputation as the worst pope in history. In the process he has written a well-researched, painstakingly honest and hugely entertaining book.

Does he achieve his object? The reader must judge. Noel certainly, in my view, clears Alexander of simony in buying his way into the papal chair, one charge often laid against him even by Catholics. But the great vice of the Borgias was nepotism, and there Alexander followed in the footsteps of his uncle Calixtus, who descended to new depths, even by 15th-century papal standards, in giving benefices to his family (and other Spaniards).